Episerver

What is Episerver?

Episerver is a world-leading platform for CMS and e-commerce. In 2022, Episerver changed the name of its products to Optimizely after acquiring the American world-leading experimentation company with the same name. Since then, they have expanded with additional products.

This acquisition made the company a full-service provider in digital marketing, including products such as CMS, e-commerce, CMP, CDP, experimentation and personalization.

Episerver helps manage the increasing demands for a seamless customer journey, and more importantly, helps editors and marketers to do more and have better opportunities and support in their web communication.

Episerver CMS 

Episerver is a popular and favored CMS in Sweden. The main advantages of Episerver CMS include:

• User-friendly – built with editors' needs in mind
• WYSIWYG – What you see is what you get, a type of editor software that allows you to view and edit a page that looks like the website.
• Admin features – permission-controlled options to change rights, create user groups, update jobs, create redirects, etc
• Scalability with Microsoft technology
• Block and template system for creating unique webpages
• Language and multisite capabilities for creating multilingual websites and different domains sharing the same codebase.

Why did Episerver change its name to Optimizely?

Episerver has long been a leading platform in both Sweden and parts of Europe. Even though they have been in the USA a while Episerver did not achieve the same growth as, for example, the Danish company Sitecore, which chose a more aggressive marketing strategy early on and spent significantly more money on marketing in the USA. 

When current CEO Alex Atzberger, who came from SAP, with new owners behind him, began acquiring several world-leading products, their goal was to build an overall product suite that large companies and organizations would be interested in buying.

One challenge was that Episerver was still relatively unknown in the US market, and there was also a challenge with having "Server" in the name, as the company's business had gradually moved to the cloud with PAAS and SAAS solutions instead of the previous on-premise solutions.

After acquiring the world-leading web experimentation company Optimizely, which had a very strong brand in the US, Episerver chose to use this and simply rename Episerver to Optimizely. However, it is still the same products behind the name and there are still traces of the name Episerver from a technical standpoint.

How big is Episerver today?

Episerver (now as Optimizely) has stated that during May 2024, they had around 1,600 employees with offices around the world. The same month, they announced that they had reached a new milestone of $400 million in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue), which means they have grown significantly in recent years - with double-digit growth in the past 4 quarters.

They still have an office in Stockholm with around 120 employees, as well as several offices in the USA, and countries in Asia such as Vietnam and Bangladesh, in addition to their many local sales offices around the world.

What is the valuation of Episerver today?

Insight Venture Partners acquired Episerver in September 2018 for $1.16 billion. They have stated that they have had a CAGR of 21% in recent years, so the current valuation is likely to have grown several times since then. Compared to the previously often compared Danish competitor Sitecore, which was bought by EQT for $1.1 billion two years earlier than Episerver reached the same valuation, the Danish company has not grown at the same level. EQT was rumored of trying to sell Sitecore for $2 billion in 2023, but reportedly did not succeed.

Episerver's history 

Episerver is originally a Swedish company founded in 1994. The first CMS solution was released in 1997 and has since grown on the Swedish market in both the private and public sectors. Episerver changed its name to Optimizely in 2022, in connection with the American acquisition.

Epinova and Episerver

Epinova was founded in 2007 in Norway as a specialist agency with the goal of only working with Episerver - hence the name Epinova. In 2018, Epinova started in Sweden and managed to recruit several senior profiles in the industry with extensive experience in Episerver, including CEO Linus Ekström, who had worked at Episerver for 13 years. This led to significant growth for the company. Epinova is now a leading Nordic player - still with a focus on Episerver (Optimizely).